This morning on the Today programme, BBC Radio 4, there was an item on archives and preservation of knowledge. This was prompted by the news that the poet,Wendy Pope, had sold her archive to the British Library and led to a wider discussion about preserving documents in the electronic age, the difficulties thereof due to sheer volume, and how important librarians and archivists were to the organisation and management of such collections in today's 'digital abundance'.
Naturally it made me think of Conductive Education and what was being done to save its history, development and practice. The National Library aimed to fufill this role as far as it was possible whilst I was Librarian, collecting centre brochures, reports, press cuttings, reports etc, but I would think maintaining the collection in this way will have been very difficult if not impossible during the past two years.
Maintaining this blog, reporting and recording events, answering enquiries is my small contribution to establishing a record, a history, the facts of what is happening in the CE world. Another resource is the virtual library, the virtual catalogue which includes items on the Internet which are available to those who want to investigate, analyse and discuss. Unfortunately one disadvantage of the Internet is the 'disappearance' of items due to broken links, deletion or being moved to new locations as has happened with some of the items I have found for the Virtual Catalogue, but with limited resources it is not possible to track everything down.
I do my best.
One question you may ask is does anyone really care? Other than me, of course. If Conductive Education is to have a future surely it must have a recorded past to learn from and build on?
I would like to offer everyone the chance to present their papers, documents, writings to me for inclusion in the Repository on http://www.e-conduction.org/ or to keep with other material I am collecting here in my 'office'.
Let's do our best to save and preserve knowledge for those who will follow us in the years to come.
2 comments:
You are doing a wonderful job Gill, thank you for doing it for us all.
I expect that I have a mass of stuff that I could give to you once I get down to sorting it all out!
Another problem we have is loosing material that has been posted on Facebook. It seems to me that it is impossible to search for information that has been put on the different facebook pages without scrolling backwards. Or have I missed something that I could do to make it easier?
There are a lot of valuable links and information that are getting drowned in cyberspace that we should rescue, but how?
Do we just take them out and put them on a blog? A Facebook Conductive Links Blog perhaps? Or is there another way of doing it? One of the conductive geeks out their maybe able to advise us.
Susie
Interesting and important point, Susie.
Yet, I heard the lady on the wireless this morning too and what she said about e-archiving certainly struck a particular chord with me. I am wondering about archiving my own Facebook stuff if I can only work out how to so in an economical way.
As for the wider question, of course CE has to preserve its past. Nobody will preserve it for us! But it all takes time and money.
Andrew.
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